This I Believe

Over the last weeks I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I might say that I believe. Late yesterday I finished up the final draft. This morning around 6:30am I decided not to use it. I do have a few notes here that I will refer to.

During the Christmas Eve service of 2002 (I was sitting right over there), I decided to become more than a casual friend of this church. I would become an active friend. I didn’t tell anyone but my brothers. I did become more active in the church and thereby met people who positively influenced my life. After Sunday lunch on Memorial Day weekend of 2003, I didn’t feel so great and laid down on the sofa in our living room. The sofa is a yellow floral print and the walls are painted yellow. Nancy, my wife, came in and said, “You know, you don’t look so good to me. You look sort of yellow. But maybe it’s the reflection from the sofa and walls???” Well, it turned out not to be a reflection. I was jaundiced. I spent the next four days in the hospital and became the guy in the story you hear about who the doctor tells, “You have incurable, terminal cancer and without surgery you won’t live past 6 months.” I had surgery a couple weeks later on Friday, June 13, 2003. Obviously, it turned out to be a good choice. All the cancer that possibly could be removed was and the doctors predicted that I might live 12 to 18 months.

Let me give you a little background about who I am and where I’m from. I was born in Southeast Alabama in a rural community and was raised as a Southern Baptist. My family moved to North Carolina when I was twelve. One of the things I learned as a Southern Baptist was that each person is responsible for their own relationship with God. That teaching has stuck with me because I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to work out that relationship. I became a ministerial student, was ordained and spent a year in the ministry. I minored in Philosophy and took several courses in Eastern Religious thought. After a year in the ministry, I decided to take a job as a Human Resource trainee and worked the next 22 years in industry. I entered HR to be a champion for the little guy, the people who needed a voice. I got out of HR because the function of that job had become a champion for the corporation.

After leaving industry, I returned to college for two years and earned an associate degree in horticulture. For the next 13 years I worked at the Biltmore Estate as a landscape gardener and crew leader. I thoroughly enjoyed that time working in one of the finest gardens in the Southeast. My assignment was away from the grand house and the formal gardens. I was much more involved with the naturalistic landscape. Having spent so many years in a factory office, at times with no windows, my office now became the hillsides and meadows of the Biltmore Estate. I did love it.

My religious evolution has been from a ‘born-again Christian’ to an agnostic to an atheist and back again to an agnostic. I just really don’t know. And the more I learn, the more I wonder. I can’t say whether there’s anybody or anything that’s bigger than us, which consciously had anything to do with us. I do think there are other intelligent life forms in other places and maybe even in other universes. I would like to be around a long time to hear and learn from these other places and share with other life forms.

Due to fatigue associated with my illness, I regularly have only 3 or 4 hours a day that I can be physically active. I spend a lot of time just lying around resting, reading, dozing and thinking. And at times obsessing about life and death, about what’s important and what’s not. For me the things that are important are family and community. (And I consider church to be about community. It’s a group of people who usually share ideals, encourage each other and hopefully enhance each others’ life experience). The gifts we bring to this community are what makes our lives meaningful, not just what we get from this community.

And that’s what I believe, today.